


Virtues Carved in Flesh

by Iktsuarpok



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Stuttering, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:23:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3870235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iktsuarpok/pseuds/Iktsuarpok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Earl Harlan has learned many things through the years, lessons that burn as hard as metal and as soft as snakeskin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Patience (Part 1: Roger)

**Author's Note:**

> First solo fic! Only real trigger warning would be implied child abuse/rough home life. Notes/pairings/ratings subject to change as I write this. 
> 
> -M

Earl Harlan had always considered himself to be a patient man.

Of course, being patient was worth it for those he loved.

He had been there for his Roger, the light of his life.  
The speech therapy had been helping, sure, but every  
stutter  
slurred affectionate word  
and  
awkward phrase  
built up in a young, scrambled voice hadn’t yet been cured.  
The boy had been improving, yes, but the children were always so /cruel/. 

Earl knew better than most, centering his life around the next generation of boys in Night Vale. The children didn’t /mean/ to be horrid (most of the time) and he was quite sure of that fact, but it didn’t take away the tears from his son’s eyes. It didn’t take away those sobs in the night he could hear from behind the closed door of the boy’s bedroom, and it would never take away the /fury/ that only a helpless father feels.

There was no way to force the others to be friends with a child unable to communicate.  
Not even a father could replace the days meant to be spent running with a platonic soulmate under the glowing desert sun.

Earl could only be patient.

After all, he was a very patient man.

He’d held his son through the worst of the tears, through the darker of the nights with hushed promises of the sun-lit future. How some children bloomed late in their childhood, how those few often grew to be the most beloved of all.

His child.  
Roger, pained and crying in his arms.

Lord have mercy on those who harmed his child, his baby boy.

But Earl was a patient man, and patient men only held tight to their children and supported them as well as they could. All he could do, helpless against a world of cruelty, was to provide what he could, to nourish the boy’s spirit before it went out entirely.

He could dream of knocking in the other’s parent’s teeth later, dispensing the proper punishment of those who raised their children to carry a spark of hate in their small hearts, to give birth to someone who’d find joy in crushing another’s spirit. 

But Earl would have to bide his time, and the other parents would have to be culled another day.

He would wait, curled and ready, as all patient men did.


	2. Patience (Part 2: Cecil)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That implied abuse kicks in here.  
> Updates will come as soon as humanly possible, as I write this.
> 
> -M

Earl Harlan was a patient man.

But even then, he’d had to dig deep to handle Cecil.

Cecil.  
Where would he even begin to start?  
Maybe with the   
summer  
spring  
winter  
autumn   
nights spent together, curled under their waxed canvas tent.

They’d stolen the cheap fabric from behind the Ralph’s.

(Or, rather, they’d taken it from the lot where the dump truck took away any unwanted materials. Earl had tried to make Cecil see reason, but Cecil had insisted they term the action of taking garbage as “stealing”. It was more… adult.)

Earl had been content to leave the nutty brown parchment fabric plain, or at least to try and dye it in a camouflage pattern so that they’d be well hidden, but Cecil had been struck with inspiration.  
Stars.  
Big ones, little ones, all painted in the golden inks Cecil had saved dearly for to buy from the Saturday flea market. He’d bought others too, at Earl’s insistence that the night sky was beautiful precisely because of how many colors actually lived up there. 

(He’d seen them all as he peered out from where he slept under the trailer home his Momma and Dad lived in. Moving out and living underneath it had been a hard decision, but Momma and Dad had been /very/ persuasive.)

Those night sky colors…

(Earl had been in shock when he’d first started living in his old dog’s crate under the trailer, but once the wetness in his eyes had dried, he’s been captivated… no, he’d been /enraptured/ by what he saw.)

Royal blues like the parts of the ocean we claim to love and pretend to fear, reds like the snap of canine jaws over the hard packed snow over the Yukon trails. Greens dancing in the shadows of the stars like the razor sharp grass after a heavy rain, purples richer and haughtier than the birds far, far away who wore them to find their One True Love in the deep darkness of the jungle.

The redhaired boy had murmured in the   
flashlight lit  
shy eyed   
delicately bruised skinned  
darkness   
with the air of the late spring heavy like down feathers, all the colors he’d seen in his lonely, lonely nights.   
Earl had explained, and Cecil had delivered the miniature sky he had promised. 

And lord above, what a sky.

The cosmos had swept themselves across the roof of their tent in every color that the wide eyed Boy Scout had held to in his own private darkness. Cecil had even added the constellations, the glimmering golden ink standing out with every pass of the flashlight’s gaze. 

Cecil’s arm had absentmindedly wrapped around Earl’s bony shoulders, tanned skin warm against the thinner boy’s freckled, sunburnt skin. 

They were eternal, in their self constructed heavens of one’s sight and the other’s art.

In a burst of ink and canvas, Earl Harlan fell in love. 

\---------

He’d been so very patient, carrying around his secret   
like a bird’s egg   
swaddled for warmth   
in a mess of   
abandoned   
feathers.

Cecil was delicate like clothes sewn of onion skin and corn silk  
soft as rabbit fur  
wise for his age   
(and losing wisdom with every passing year).  
The honey voiced boy had galloped and leaped from stuttering awkwardness into a smoother tone of speech, his voice cracking more and more as the years passed. Cracking away like mud from a shell, chucks falling away to reveal the gem beneath. 

He was laughter in the summertime storms and hushed reverence in the quiet nook the two of them had found one day, the perfect for two little boys to hide away and dream of better tomorrows.

Cecil was…

Well, he was everything a person could want.   
Everything a person would need.

But he was also Earl’s Best Friend, the only one he had, and would it /really/ be worth it to risk all that?  
Yes/No?

No, it wouldn’t be worth it. How could he risk losing Cecil’s smile when their eyes met? Or the way Cecil’s hand would gently grab his as they walked down the long road to the Harlan family trailer, the journey that Earl never wanted to end.

The grass on the side of the road was course razor sharp, dusty green bustles and strands stained from the dirt of the long, field lined road the two boys walked along. It was so horribly easy to feel like it was the road to hell, back to a place of too large hands in too small a trailer, the aluminum sides rusted and shedding like scales from a snake. 

But Cecil’s slender, delicate hand in his own was a comfort unlike any other. Earl’s fears were soothed in the  
sunlit  
dusty  
togetherness

of the road home.

Cecil would always be there, patient with his Best Friend’s fears, soothing frayed nerves with a soft tone and an   
aura   
of calm in the 

trembling  
shark skinned   
jagged 

dwelling the Harlan family   
(a strong word for something so shattered)   
had inhabited. 

How could he not fall in love with Cecil after that? 

But to speak up would be to shatter the peaceful solemnity they shared, something that he could never take back.  
(They could have lasted after that, as mature adults, but it would have been far too much to ask of mere children.)

What was left was only to wait, for a quiet Boy Scout to bide his time for when his best friend might express the desire to be something more, for when their fingers touched with something more than just friendship in mind. 

He’d be there for Cecil, for better or for worse, in night and day, in starlight and sunlight.

Earl would be patient.


End file.
